New York Times: Best Art of 2022
December 7, 2022
Roberta Smith
Read hereA Trove of Unexpected Delights
This year’s movable feast of outstanding museum and gallery exhibitions often left me breathless. The ones that hit me hardest tended to be monographic undertakings that brought to light overlooked careers, offered new approaches to familiar ones and sometimes encouraged curatorial creativity. The artists revealed in these shows were insiders, outsiders and, as such boundaries dissolve, both-siders. All but a few of them delved into the past, yielding renewed relevance to the present.
Robert Colescott at the New Museum
The New Museum’s raucous survey Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott brought overdue attention to a rare American painter, who, like Peter Saul and Leon Golub placed equal emphasis on form and subject matter. His irreverent Pop-inflected style pitted the history of painting against an unsettling, sometimes politically incorrect commentary on race in America. It is hard to imagine many younger painters, most notably Kerry James Marshall and Henry Taylor, without his example. (Read our review of Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott.)
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